Usual Suspects

By Swapan Dasgupta

A few passage from All These Years (Penguin Books, 1991), Raj Thapar’s candid insider account of court life in the age of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi may be relevant in today’s irreverent age when an outsider Prime Minister is questioning the fundamentals of entitlement.

“It was within ten days of Nehru’s death that Indira rang Romesh [Thapar] one morning, sounding desperate. Meher Chand Khanna, the then Housing Minister, had apparently sent his minions to ask her if they could remove the furniture and that she plan to vacate the [Teen Murti] House as soon as possible. She was alarmed. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked, almost in tears. He told her to sit tight, take her time, and he would see that no one dare throw her out…”

“Teen Murti House seemed to have a life quite independent of the occupants. Rumour had it that Shastri’s wife declined to use it as a residence because Nehru’s ghost must haunt the rambling structure since the kriya ceremony had not been performed and his spirit not been released in the way it should have been…No way could Shastri be persuaded to step into a defiled space. It was not a question of contaminating his soul but of putting an uncertainty over his future, his political future.”

“Meanwhile Indira called a meeting of a hundred citizens, from the big industrialists downwards, to form the Nehru Memorial Trust. She co-opted Romesh on to the panel of original trustees…The Fund was created, Teen Murti was dedicated to the nation and the ‘people of India’ and new expansion plans were put into operation…”

What Raj Thapar, with a charming measure of feigned innocence, described in her memoirs was a well-executed and ruthless land-grab operation. First, Indira Gandhi is tearfully outraged that she is asked to vacate a public building that served as Nehru’s official residence for 17 years. Encouraged by her courtiers, she is determined to not lose control of a property she now views as an inheritance.

Therefore, after seeking sympathy that naturally comes to any family after a bereavement, her supporters whisper that the un-refined Lal Bahadur Shastri is not fit to occupy a place that housed the great Nehru. The point of this psychological warfare is two-fold. Shastri must be intimidated into believing that it would be sacrilegious for him to move into Teen Murti. In the process, there is a distinction made between Teen Murti House, the Prime Minister’s official residence, and Teen Murti House, the residence of Nehru. Once Shastri is bullied into not moving into Teen Murti, it loses its undefined status as the PM’s official residence. It comes to be associated solely with Nehru.

The dynasty then moves fast. It sets up the mandataory trust, arm-twists the industrialists it otherwise despises into making handsome contributions and creates the conditions for Teen Murti House to become a family shrine. True, Indira didn’t get to live in Teen Murti House—I guess she didn’t factor the possibility of her becoming PM in less than two years—but at least a principle was established: the dynasty doesn’t relinquish real estate that easily.

A casual look at the map would indicate the extent of land-grab. Teen Murti houses the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library that is nominally under the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India. It was deemed sufficiently important for the Congress dispensation for its tenured Director to be appointed in the interregnum between the last date of polling and the declaration of results in May 2014. The Director is no doubt an eminent historian but the manner of his appointment was distinctly dodgy.

Then there is Indira Gandhi Memorial at the junction of Safdarjung Road and Akbar Road—two Lutyen’s bungalows that also doubled up as the unofficial headquarters of the Congress(T) in the last years of the Narasimha Rao government, before Sonia assumed charge of the party. There is also the single bungalow office of the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Trust on Willingdon Crescent.

The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation is located on Raisina Road, on premises that were initially given to the Congress to use as its permanent headquarters. The Congress remains exactly where it was in a spacious Akbar Road bungalow but the new building has been transferred to the dynasty’s trust. The same fate would have befallen the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts that had proposed Sonia Gandhi for a lifelong role. But with a change of government, this institution can perhaps be salvaged and made to play the role it was set up for.

And this is not to forget the case of Herald House, the prime property on Bahadurshah Zafar Marg that now serves as a Passport Office. The irony of the government paying rent to a family-controlled Trust that secured government land at subsidised rate for the ostensible purpose of bringing out a publication is inescapable.

Maybe someone should do an audit of the value of the real estate in Delhi that is under the direct or indirect control of the Gandhi family. The nation, it would seem, owes this family everything and it has repaid the debt by entrusting prime real estate to institutions set up by them. And this does not include the government-provided residences in Lutyens’ Delhi—some, no doubt, legitimate—to all of Nehru’s remaining heirs.

Is it any wonder that Ajit Singh, the son of Charan Singh, believes he is being short-changed by a government that views government buildings as a hotel—where you check in but must also check out? The Modi government is being pilloried because it doesn’t view the state as private property. 

Sunday Pioneer, September 21, 2014

By Swapan Dasgupta

External Affairs Minister is by no means the only ‘foreigner’ to view the possibility of a possible secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom with a measure of disbelief. The dissolution of long-established national boundaries has invariably been preceded by civil strife and bloodshed: Biafra, Bangladesh, East Timor and South Sudan being recent examples. Where separation has been relatively peaceful, though not necessarily devoid of bitterness, there has been a near-unequivocal assertion of the popular will. Ukraine, often regarded as the alter ego of Russia, for example, broke away from the Soviet-established ‘Union’ in 1991, after nearly 88 per cent of its citizens voted for independence.

Going by the opinion polls, the referendum in Scotland on September 18 is likely to be much more fiercely contested. Some six months ago, the likelihood of Scotland voting for the ‘independence’ that the Scottish National Party sought was remote. However, recent polls suggest that the SNP has successfully closed the gap and that the Yes vote could even enjoy a slim majority. Earlier, the British media was referring to SNP leader Alex Salmond’s foolhardly gamble; now they are talking about the disarray in the No camp with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown undertaking a last-minute rescue act.

Since much of the debate over Scottish identity and its supposed incompatibility with British identity centres on readings of history, it is tempting to compare the panic that has overtaken the establishment in London with the panic of 1745, the last occasion when the creation of a independent Scotland seemed possible.

In that year, the ‘Young Pretender’ Bonnie Prince Charlie, grandson of the Stuart King James II—also, simultaneously, King of Scotland—who had been ousted by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for his Catholicism, landed in western Scotland from France with a few hundred loyalists. Initially, very much like today’s No campaign, the Hanoverian court didn’t take the threat very seriously. However, after Edinburgh fell and the Jacobite army started moving into England that panic set in. The rich merchants of London, fearful of their future, poured in finances to prop up an English army with formidable artillery power. When the two armies met at Culloden, there was a one-sided massacre of the Jacobite army, made up in the main of Scottish clans from the Highlands.

It is possible that had the vain and dissolute Young Pretender confined his ambitions to Scotland and not ventured into England, the political union forged by the accession of James I to the English throne would have not endured for four centuries. But regardless of the romantic myths around the Jacobites, the exiled Stuarts never enjoyed total support within Scotland. Just as the No campaign, the English army at Culloden had a large contingent of Scots.

Yet, received history doesn’t depend on the actual complexities of what really took place but more on how subsequent generations believe events unfolded. The perception that Scotland always got a raw deal from England and was the victim of intense cultural condescension have struck deep roots among resident Scots. This may have been truer of the Irish—forever the butt of ‘Paddy’ jokes—than the Scots. Yet the stereotype of the rustic Scot, so well portrayed through the eyes of the opinionated Rhodesian mining engineer Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s best-selling The Thirty-Nine Steps (later immortalised on celluloid by Alfred Hitchcock) somehow persisted.

For a lot of us, born in the aftermath of Empire, the British Isles was never the United Kingdom: it was always England, and that included Scotland. At the same time, even till the mid-Seventies, travelling to Scotland (Edinburgh apart) was akin to travelling to the ‘Continent’—a place that was different. Sometimes the experience fitted the stereotype. I recall a visit to a remote village in Skye in 1979 and being plied with drink by an overwhelmed local in a pub. It seems he had served in India during the War and I was the first Indian he had encountered since being demobbed more than three decades ago. An Indian face being a novelty in the late-1970s would have been unimaginable in any other part of the UK.

In pure historical terms, however, the notion of Scotland being left behind by Great Britain was pure fiction. The British Empire was the source of unparalleled prosperity at home. However, the plethora of opportunities that the far-flung possessions accorded to the peoples was not confined to England. The Empire, and certainly in India, was in many respects a Scottish Empire and even the Scottish Enlightenment was underwritten by Britain’s thriving overseas trade. From the “devils in skirts” who brought terror to the natives during the suppression of the 1857 revolt—hilariously caricatured by that great slapstick comedy Carry on up the Khyber—to the Scottish stranglehold over the boxwalla community of Calcutta, Scotland benefitted disproportionately from the Empire and, by implication, the Union.

It was Scotland’s inability to retain its competitive edge in the aftermath of Empire that began the process of disillusionment with Westminster. Scotland, in particular, felt the pain of Margaret Thatcher’s realignment of the British economy most acutely. By the mid-1980s, with the possible exception of Edinburgh, the scenes in urban Scotland often resembled the gloom and doom of the post-1929 Depression. Before its dramatic facelift in the Blair years, Glasgow was a distinctly riotous and even dangerous city at night.

Anger against a government shouldn’t, ideally, translate into a larger anger against an entire political dispensation. However, the electoral geography of the UK carried its own lessons. Scotland disavowed the Conservative Party quite emphatically after 1979 whereas southern England embraced it. With the Labour defeat in 2010, the perception grew in Scotland that the region had been permanently disenfranchised. This was untrue since the Scottish Assembly enjoyed considerable discretion in determining government expenditure and, in any case, Scotland’s government expenditure was always significantly higher than its revenue collection. The rest of UK was, in effect, subsidising Scotland.

Unfortunately, politics doesn’t depend on cold facts. The consummate politician that he is, Alex Salmond has been successful in converting the anger against the belt-tightening approach of the Cameron government into a larger revolt against Westminster. The anti-English undercurrent that used to surface at football matches and over the flying of the Union Jack has found a new focus with the achche din of independence.

I am on of those who feel that the last-minute panic over an uncertain future may actually see the wavering voters opt for the status quo—what with the promise of even greater devolution. However, just in case cussedness prevails, Scotland will provide a classic case study of how the clever manipulation of history and loss of British romanticism under a contrived multicultural dispensation destroyed a political arrangement that many of us believed would endure indefinitely. If Scotland falls off the map of the UK, there will be an immediate knock-on effect in Northern Ireland—a part of the UK that was emotionally abandoned by England after the Good Friday agreement of 1998. I don’t believe that we are witnessing the last gasp of the “green and pleasant land” that is England. But we could be experiencing the formal announcement of Britain’s loss of political power, a process that began in 1939 and whose first casualty was the British Empire.

Regardless of the September 18 verdict, Britain will have to redefine itself—just as Germany did after the loss of territory that followed the defeat in 1945—as a creative zone that is at the same time proud of its cultural moorings. Maybe there could be a happy ending in adversity. 

The Telegraph, September 12, 2014

By Swapan Dasgupta

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mischievous aside in Tokyo about “secular” critics at home questioning his gift of the Bhagavad Gita to Emperor Akihito wasn’t out of place in Japan. His hugely successful five-day visit to Japan was mainly centred on the promotion of India as a manufacturing hub and interlocking the two countries in a larger strategic dialogue. However, what added an extra zing was the underlying convergence in the political approaches of Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It is instructive to recall that prior to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin emerging as the principal rogue leader of a ‘normal’ country—Syria, Iraq and the Caliphate are thought to be beyond the pale—that position had been occupied by Abe. Just as the entire liberal establishment of the West had agonised over the horrendous implications of an India under the ‘majoritarian’ Modi, they had earlier rung alarm bells over Abe’s supposed bid to rekindle militaristic Japanese nationalism.

In a quirky process of ideological realignment, the anti-Abe clamour was joined by China, a country that is otherwise careful to maintain its distance from the internal politics of other countries. It is no surprise that the state-controlled Chinese media has debunked the idea of an Indo-Japan ‘united front’ as “crazy fantasy generated by Tokyo’s anxiety of facing a rising Beijing.”

As someone who has been at the receiving end of cosmopolitan derision for insisting that a modern, indeed, global India has to be rooted in traditional values and cultures, and that social harmony necessitates national pride, Modi has reason to be sympathetic to Abe’s plight. The Japanese PM who got a resounding mandate on the promise to extricate Japan from a period of prolonged stagnation is also committed to reworking the political settlement imposed on Japan by the occupation forces after 1945. Why this right should be contested seven decades after the World War is bewildering.

Abe is seeking to reverse Japan’s constitutional commitment to pacifism by re-building a national army for the ‘self-defence’ of the islands. India is an important partner in this process as is Australia. Interestingly, an increasingly beleaguered US has shed its objections to Abe’s “active pacifism” because of its growing inability to undertake the global responsibilities it assumed during the Cold War. The only real elephant in the room is, quite predictably, China that nurtures a visceral distaste of anything remotely resembling Japanese self-assertion. Like the patronising Charles De Gaulle, Beijing would rather keep alive the stereotype of the Japanese as “transistor salesmen”.

The second feature of the Abe project has been painted—in language familiar to India’s chattering classes—as “divisive” and “polarising.” The post-war settlement, apart from disbanding the military, led to Japan’s defeated leadership accepting the downgrading of the Shinto faith and adopting a school curriculum that promoted collective self-flagellation for the sins of militarism and Emperor worship. As a nation, Japan appears to have accepted apologia as its national creed with, many believe, ominous consequences.

There are undeniably facets of Japan’s past that invite unease. But that is true for almost all countries without exception. However, what is unacceptable is that 69 years after the world’s greatest weapons of mass destruction were tested on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is obliged to persist with a history written by the victors of that war. Western liberals have teamed up with China’s Red nationalists to question the right of Japan to honour the souls of those who died for the Emperor—then considered the personification of the nation. China stopped within an inch of severing diplomatic ties with Japan after former Prime Minister Koizumi made annual pilgrimages to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo—a temple that blends national honour and faith.

Maybe Modi should have visited Yasukuni but not out of a desire to score a point against China. He would have paid tribute to those Japanese martyrs who also died for the freedom of India. He would have witnessed Japan’s tribute to the Indian judge who contested the principle of victors’ justice. Equally, and in the context of the proposed monument in Delhi, he would have imbibed the significance of crafting an inseparable link between a martyr’s memorial and the national ethos. 

Sunday Times of India, September 7, 2014

By Swapan Dasgupta

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been judged harshly by his contemporaries for his unending failures to protect the integrity of his office. In plain English, he was too often a pushover, succumbing to pressures from the dynastic owners of the Congress Party and their unpalatable representatives. However, as one of his most trusted aides once revealed in an indiscreet moment some time ago, there were odd occasions when the economist-politician did take a stand—maybe because it didn’t involve the Gandhis.

The occasion was the choice of chief guest for the 2014 Republic Day functions, the final one of Singh’s long stint as Prime Minister. Singh, who had quite rightly detected the growing opportunities in Indo-Japan bilateral relations, wanted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a known friend of India, to be the chief guest. This was bitterly opposed by a section of the foreign policy establishment. The opposition (or so I was informed) was very strongly articulated by the then National Security Adviser who was said to be a veteran China hand. In the context of India, a China expert didn’t translate as Sinologists; it implied a Sinophile. Menon, it was said, had an instinctive knack of second-guessing the mandarins in Beijing.

China, the battalion of Sinophiles in Delhi argued, would not be amused by the invitation to Abe. Apart from everything else, Abe had by then developed a formidable reputation as a nationalist who played the so-called anti-China card even more deftly than the enigmatic former Prime Minister Koizumi. Much of Beijing’s anger stemmed from Koizumi and Abe’s inability to grasp the “correct” history of Japanese militarism prior to 1945. China was particularly incensed over the presence of Japan’s top leadership at events to commemorate all Japanese war heroes since the Meiji Restoration at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. The shrine incorporated the spirits of all those (by name) who had died for the Emperor in battle. These included 18 Class A “war criminals” who had been convicted and executed by the International War Crimes Tribunal set up after Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945.

It is to Singh’s credit that he overruled the objections and invited Abe for the Republic Day celebrations. In his final months Singh wasn’t able to achieve anything substantial but he at least laid the foundation of robust bilateral relations that Prime Minister Modi was able to build on during his recent, hugely successful visit to Japan.   

China’s official reaction to Modi’s visit and his close personal rapport with Abe has been understandably guarded. With President Xi Jinping scheduled to visit India later this month, Beijing—which always understands the virtues of patience—is unwilling to say anything that will sour the mood in India. At the same time, the state-controlled media has not missed the opportunity to take pot shots at both Japan and India—and certainly not after Modi’s snide reference, in a response to a student’s question on China, to a 18^th century “imperialist mindset” that still prevails. The state-run Global Times, for example, described Japan’s purported attempt to forge a united front against China as a “crazy fantasy”. An article suggested—perhaps not inaccurately—that “Modi is more intimate to Tokyo emotionally. Therefore…he embraces some nationalist sentiments against China.”

These may indicate China’s early misgivings of Modi’s foreign policy initiatives in Asia but they don’t as yet suggest that Beijing has decided to travel down a hostile path vis a vis Delhi. There may be a belief in Beijing that any leverage Japan might gain with its enhanced economic partnership with India can be neutralised by even more generous Chinese offerings. This buy-the-country approach has worked partially in Sri Lanka and large chunks of Africa but it is seen to be floundering in large parts of South-east Asia.

A section of Indian business may be attracted by the charms of cheap Chinese imports and very competitive financing offered by China but these are offset by the larger threats posed by China. In simple terms, China has not made any secret of its desire to be the hegemonic power in Asia. It may respect national sovereignty but that comes with a larger political cost: tacitly acknowledging China’s dominance in Asia. Japan has realised this to its cost, as have countries such as Singapore, Vietnam and Australia. Many of these countries now look up to India as an important countervailing force to China.

The real challenge for India is to balance a very legitimate and growing business relationship with China with wariness over its larger strategic designs. Japan has offered India defence collaboration and economic partnership for the sake of a loose alliance aimed at keeping Asia outside the control of a dominant power. In the coming days, the visiting Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot is likely to revive the old idea of a Australia-Japan-India trilateral arrangement, maybe as a return gift for a nuclear agreement and supply of uranium. Should India fall back on some mythical Non-Alignment-2 that translates into a policy of appeasement of China? Or should the Modi government also draw a few new red lines in its relationship with the great power across the Himalayas?

There are no simple answers. At present India has lost the capacity to make a meaningful decision that can withstand sustained pressure. Its economy is yet to go on full steam and its defence preparedness is non-existent. The Modi government’s main priority must be to enhance India’s national capacity, using all available opportunities at its disposal. This could even mean playing limited footsie with China and keeping uninhibited cohabitation with Japan and Australia for another day. Of course, the risk is that China won’t hesitate to encash its many IOUs in India to force Modi into acknowledging China’s titular supremacy. Recall how easily the CPI(M) teamed up with the Congress after the 1998 Pokhran-2 tests.

Some deft diplomacy is the order of the day. But let there be no confusion over the fact that a menacing China isn’t in India’s national interests. By comparison, neither Japan nor Australia has agendas inimical to India. On the contrary, with a weakened US, their friendship acquires greater meaning. 

Asian Age, September 5, 2014